Climate change: Behold, the gospel according to the UN

The Methodist Church is adopting the IPCC's report on global warming as holy
writ, finds Christopher Booker

By Christopher Booker

6:04PM BST 07 Aug 2010

Anyone who has observed the way the belief in man-made global warming has become for many a new religion might be intrigued by a lengthy document published by the Methodist Church, in the hope that next year it will become official Methodist policy.

Entitled Our Hope in God’s Future, it kicks off by proclaiming that “the theological task is to reflect on modern scientific accounts of the threats posed by climate change in the context of affirming the triune God as creator and redeemer of the universe”. “What is required of God’s people,” it goes on, “is repentance.” The first step must be “confessing our complicity in the sinful structures which have caused the problem”.

The document makes it clear that all good Methodists must take as their new Bible the latest report of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, along with the famous report by Lord Stern. Inspired by this holy writ, like any Old Testament prophet it reels off all those familiar apocalyptic warnings of the catastrophes sinful mankind is bringing on the planet – floods, droughts, hurricanes, killer heatwaves, melting ice caps, sea levels rising by 20 feet (although they did get that one from the prophet Gore).

One cannot imagine how they left out plagues and swarms of locusts, since they could have found biblical evidence for this in the IPCC report. But, of course, only the most devout disciple will still believe in all these apocalyptic predictions anyway, since in every case there is plenty of sound science to suggest they are no more than scare stories.

Quite what the Methodist faithful are supposed to do to avert all these disasters, the document doesn’t make clear, apart from droning on, just like Chris Huhne, about the need to work for salvation by creating a “low-carbon economy”. But one thing that is clear is that the authors of this document have completely abandoned the core principle of Arminian theology that led John Wesley to set up the Methodist church in the first place — namely that “no works of human effort can cause or contribute to human salvation”. Perhaps if these Methodists want to start a new religion they should just join Greenpeace, which got there before them.